Long-gestating Beaverton chip company Ambric has called it quits and plans to sell its assets, the company said today, after it failed to line up funding.

"Ambric was unable to secure additional financing in the current economic environment and has suspended all operations not associated with the sale of the company or fulfillment of existing customer production requests through its long term supply agreements," the company said in a statement.

Ambric designed high-performance chips for video and other media-rich applications. The company was founded in 2003, and launched its first chip at the start of this year.

I'll update this post later, and have more in the paper tomorrow.

Update below:

Spoke this afternoon with OVP's Gerry Langeler, who provided some of the backstory on Ambric's shutdown.

OVP was one of Ambric's initial backers, helping it raise a Series A round of $10.4 million in 2004.

The company has been looking for additional funding since last fall, Gerry said, in a period when the venture outlook for startups was a "nightmare." Even so, Ambric managed to drum up $22 million more last fall -- most of that from new investors.

Its first chip came out early this year, and was well received, Gerry said. Ambric's technology was designed to make it easier to program "massively parallel core" chips -- computers with as many as 300 processors working together. Since it's notoriously difficult to program that many processors, Gerry said Ambric started with the human equation in mind.

"They designed the programming environment first and then built the chips around it," he said.

Ambric was targeting the market for digital video processing initially, but had drummed up interest from the medical industry and military sector, too.

Ambric's next generation of technology was due out early next year -- the prototype chips were due back this week. But the company needed more money to carry it through, and Gerry said the funding just wasn't there.

The company has about 60 employees, nearly all of them in Beaverton. The best hope is that whoever buys the technology will retain some of that team.